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Calientequacker

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Dec 20, 2013
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So a couple months ago I bought a second Seagate 2tb HDD to store a lot of videos and pictures on, for about week now I keep hearing this periodical noise, it sounds like an object that is spinning at a high rate of speed is touching another object (best way I could describe it) and makes this quick grinding sound, when this happens I can see my mouse cursor in windows dose the little blue circle loading animation. Could this be my new Hard drive failing?
 
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Your description sounds like the hard drive simply went into power save (spun down) because it hadn't been used in a while. The noise is probably the drive spinning up, and the grinding is the read/write head scanning for the data it's spinning the drive up to read. The mouse cursor goes into the pause animation because the computer has to wait for the disk to finish spinning up.

You can turn off hard drive idling...

D_Know_WD

Estimable
Hi there Calientequacker,

As you are facing some HDD issues, you should back up the data that is stored on the drive until you resolve the issue.
After that, you need to test the drive with a brand specific testing tool. If it fails the test, I guess you should contact the manufacturer and eventually RMA it(as it is a new one).
Another thing you can do is to open up the computer case(to get a clearer picture of what is going on inside) and make sure that the noise comes from the HDD. Swapping cables/ports it will not hurt as well.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD
 

Tom Waller

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Jan 14, 2015
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HDD's do make noise unlike using SSD's. Is it a very loud clicking noise? This is when the reader springs back and forward very fast when It cant read the corrupt data.

If it's a very quiet type of grind sound, it's perfectly fine. As annoying as it is, HDD's do make noise as their are moving parts. I panicked when i first had this problem, I got the HDD replaced and it sounds the same :)
 

Your description sounds like the hard drive simply went into power save (spun down) because it hadn't been used in a while. The noise is probably the drive spinning up, and the grinding is the read/write head scanning for the data it's spinning the drive up to read. The mouse cursor goes into the pause animation because the computer has to wait for the disk to finish spinning up.

You can turn off hard drive idling (i.e. leave it spinning all the time) to confirm if this is what you're hearing.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/140592-hard-drive-turn-off-hard-disk-after-idle-never.html

If it is just the drive going into and out of power save, you can set the idle timer to a more convenient value for you, or simply leave it off. Consumes a bit more power, but that shouldn't really matter on a desktop.
 
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